


steady, boys, steady

by scioscribe



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Last survivors, wound fingering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-21
Updated: 2018-10-21
Packaged: 2019-08-05 02:53:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16359344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Hickey’s hardly thought of him this whole time.  Fitzjames just limns Crozier: coming across him alone’s like stumbling on gilt with no edge.  But he does make a bit of a picture, dashed against the rocks all mussed and defiant.





	steady, boys, steady

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Heart of Oak."

Hickey finds Fitzjames in the fog, a patch of blood seeping out of his chest like damp from a wall. He’s overtaxed himself; he can’t even stand. With his shot spent he’s helpless now.

Hickey’s hardly thought of him this whole time. Fitzjames just limns Crozier: coming across him alone’s like stumbling on gilt with no edge. But he does make a bit of a picture, dashed against the rocks all mussed and defiant. He still smells like gunpowder from those Chinese rockets of his. Bright red streaks in the gloom.

“You might have saved my life, firing those off,” Hickey says.

Fitzjames’s grin is all white teeth and bloody sockets. “I assure you, Mr. Hickey, that was never my intention. I almost repent of my aim.”

“That it benefited me at all is a sin in itself.” He can smile back without showing so much as a trace of red. The scurvy’s hardly touched him. Poison, sickness, madness, the beast, and now a noose around his neck—he’s slipped every death they have tried to give him. Cornelius Hickey’s body went into that canal and the water washed it clean, as pretty a church service as any man has ever had. God and death claimed that soul and now they cannot see his.

He has gone beyond those places mapped by men. He knows it. He feels it.

He cracks his neck to the side. Studies what’s in front of him.

“All your people are dead,” he says. “The creature took them.”

“I’ve never found you to be a reliable witness,” Fitzjames says at once, but his breath quickens. The stain on his breast makes even the shallowest movement obvious.

Hickey crouches down. Fitzjames has the advantage in height, but Hickey’s been above his eyeline nearly as much as he’s been below it: men stand where officers sit. Now they are eye-to-eye. Funny thing. He’s not sure it’s happened before.

“I won’t take you with me,” Hickey says. “I don’t think you’d make it far anyway, Commander. But I could send you off, quick and easy. I know how to put a suffering creature out of its misery.”

He strips off his glove and lays his bare hand on Fitzjames’s cold, soot-streaked cheek. He feels a kind of nostalgia for him: he belongs so clearly to the old wooden world, to the riot and splendor of Carnivale. Fitzjames should have died in the blaze, Bacchus going down with his flagon, surrounded by a London painted on linen. It would have been poetic. Now he’s outlived all he made and he’s coming to know it—it’s in his eyes. He can clock how long it is they’ve been talking. He knows Hickey wouldn’t linger like this if it weren’t safe.

Fitzjames thinks if he holds his face all rigid like that, Hickey won’t notice his eyes have gotten wet.

“And your men, Mr. Hickey?”

“Does it make a difference to you?” He’s genuinely curious about this, but all the same he doesn’t wait for an answer. His joints are sound enough, but his knees aren’t immune to stiffness. He shrugs. “To my eyes they’re as gone as your own.”

Billy. Tozer. He saw their bodies and that’s proof enough for him: the weak don’t live where the strong die. They were his, more or less, and now they’re nothing. Now they’re only flesh.

He undoes Fitzjames’s clothes and pushes them aside, baring the open wound. It’s a nasty piece of work. He traces its ragged edges. No prize for guessing what made that. He prods one fingertip in and Fitzjames jerks, makes a sound that carries far in their newfound stillness. Hickey presses further in and watches Fitzjames clench his teeth together even as they wobble in his gums. At last he pulls back, wiping blood in a thick line on Fitzjames’s coat.

“Do you object to my tender care, Commander?”

There’s no reply for a bit outside ragged breathing, but then Fitzjames gathers himself: heart of oak, Hickey thinks half-admiringly, but even oak rots in the end.

“I only thought you’d decided to kill me by half-inches. I’m relieved to know that’s not the case.”

“You’ve thought more about my offer, then.”

Why does he still tarry here? The beast prefers fresh game to carrion, true; he won’t return tonight. There are supplies to be salvaged from the wreck of their company. But he’s hardly in the midst of that, is he? He has Commander Fitzjames’s blood under his fingernail, a thin crescent moon. He’s listening to the rocks grate under his boots as he shifts his weight.

Fitzjames is calm. One of his arms seems lame, but he uses the other to button himself again. “I have trouble wanting your kindness, Mr. Hickey, if it’s even meant as kindness at all. No, I don’t take your offer. I’ll stay in misery a little longer.”

It’s in his gaze: he hopes to find his feet again. And then he won’t even set a course and walk it till he drops; he will waste his last hours building some cairn. For all of them, probably, but for Crozier at the very least. It’s his nature, maybe. Fitzjames is adornment with nothing left to adorn and so he must go on polishing lives and navies and empires that no longer exist, that could never have thrived here in the first place.

Hickey stands. “He’s on the western side of the perimeter. Captain Crozier, or what’s left of him.”

Fitzjames nods. He doesn’t say whether he takes this news as kindness; if he makes some judgment in his mind on whether or not Hickey is capable of that, he keeps it to himself.


End file.
